There was no bus.
I only realized that some twenty minutes after I paid for a ticket from Abuja to Jos. A couple of people who had come before me were also waiting, huddled in a shed, avoiding the sun.
I figured it was still early. Maybe when the itinerary form we wrote our names, phone numbers, our next of kins and their phone numbers was filled, a bus or car would appear from nowhere. I prayed it would be a car.
I used to put my father’s name and number in the next of kin slot. Not because we were that close, but because his was the only number apart from mine which I memorized as far back as from my teens when I would give his number to my little town love interests and ask them to message only at midnight. My father slept early and his phone was never locked.
When my father passed away in the middle of the Covid lockdowns, I learned to memorize other people’s numbers. My baby sister. My closest friend. My older brother. My other brother. People who would know what to do if they get a call telling them something had happened to me on the road. Who would know who to call.
I walked to a kiosk by the waiting shed and settled on the bench, nodding a greeting to the Northern man sitting behind a table of egg crates stacked on each other, packs of one of the cheaper noodles variations that are giving Indomie a run for their money and popularity, sachets of Nescafe 3-in-1. I asked for “the small Nescafe wey bitter.” I asked him to make it 3 sticks in the cup.
I thought about ordering noodles too. But I don’t trust my stomach on the road.
The coffee came. Scalding like a severe heartburn. I sipped it like that, the heat burning the taste from my tongue. A little kid wandered away from his parents and stood a few yards from me, staring. He backed off when I lifted my head to stare at him. I watched him run to his mother and then look back towards me, pointing a finger as if to say, “mama, see, bad man.”
I drank my coffee slowly. A couple of vendors approached me with their wares. Someone tried to sell me chocolates, another was carrying a tray of kolanuts. There was one selling fake watches and powerbanks that wouldn’t last. There was a mallam who made me smile when he demonstrated how long my dick would grow if i bought and used the roots he was holding up to my face, making a flogging gesture at the same time. I shook my head politely.
The sun started to burn.
My phone started to vibrate. Iya Martha has been calling me more often. “Make I see how you dey,” she would say. I would roll my eyes and complain she’s wasting data. She always asks if I was eating. I always lie.
I walked a bit away from everyone to take the video call, facing a wall so she wouldn’t see the background of buses and vendors and travellers and ask me where I was headed and have a panic attack when she heard I was going up North. I told her I was on the go and that I will call her back. She said okay although we both knew I wouldn’t.
I never do.
One hour passed. No bus.
I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I had hurriedly packed them into my box. I sometimes forget my glasses because I hardly wore them indoors and I spend a lot of time indoors. It is only when I step out that I realize I need to see beyond five paces in front of me. When I stare at people without them, I squint. My friend said I don’t know how to squint without looking like I was being threatening.
“Bus?” I went to ask the man sitting by the table, collecting payments. I noticed the slip I filled in my personal details after paying was full and another one was beside it with two names on it.
“E dey come,” he said, making a placatory gesture with his arm.
“See time?”
He made another placatory gesture. I looked beside him at the people waiting. Why does nobody ever talk?
Two hours passed. 9am became 11:46. No bus. 12:18. No bus. The sun forced me to seek shade on the bench of a woman selling buns and lukewarm drinks in a yellow cooler. I bought a bottle of Fearless to feel less awkward and intrusive. The man who sold me coffee closed shop and went somewhere, a prayer mat under his arm .
I surveyed the park. Activities had settled to a lull. There were buses with boards advertising they were going much further North. Borno. Sokoto. Adamawa. Katsina. Stray dogs nosed around, looking for food. A woman wheels a barrow of food in transparent plastic containers. It looked like she had a good sales day. Another woman carrying a meticulously arranged hill of drinks defrosting in the heat, circled the park. A vulcanizer’s apprentice, shirtless in the heat, worked on a tire, lashing at the iron with another pair of iron. His master was further away, sitting in the shade, sipping something from a stained glass. The apprentice paused to flick sweat away. His day for relaxing in the shade would come.
A few people began collecting their money back and leaving. I wished I had gone to another park. I wished Musa, the driver I had familiarised myself with, who I called whenever I needed to go somewhere in Abuja, was close by so I could send a message to him. The guy was super helpful.
1:13.
2.
I started to seethe inside, while blaming myself for not leaving earlier. For not insisting on a refund within the first forty minutes. Shebi my name was second to last an I used my two eye see 3 more people came after me? Now see? See?
I checked Maps again to calculate the distance to Jos. 5 hours. I had planned to get in early and settle down, find a decent hotel and rest before I go looking for the address of the bookshop that sent me rubbish twice. Now see!
The car finally arrived. The driver pointed me towards the front seat as I followed the others to move out bags towards the boot for the loading boys to arrange them. He looked at my face as if expecting a thank you. Person wey I wan commot e teeth. I took out my glasses from my bag and waited to see how the loader placed it, repeatedly telling him, “My laptop dey inside. Put am for up “
I shared the front seat with a teenager with short hair, dark lipstick and a big appetite.
Through the journey the girl bought and ate anything. Boiled maize, groundnuts, roasted maize, caked sesame seeds, oranges, roasted unripe plantains. I said nothing each time she had to reach across my face to examine something or pay. Once she dropped bits of sticky sesame seeds on my laps. She acted panicked as she scrambled to get them off while muttering apologies. I casually brushed them away and said nothing.
The driver attacked the road with such velocity it flung small packages of courier on the dashboard about and him and the girl take turns arranging them. He went so fast I couldn’t read the signboards we passed. I fumbled for the seatbelt and strapped myself to the seat. I have never been bothered by speed. When I used to live in Lagos, before they banned O-rides, i loved to book late night rides from the Mainland to the Island. I loved the adrenaline as the machines burned asphalt as they stormed into the night. The smell of the water on Third Mainland Bridge. The winking lights getting closer and closer. The generated breeze strong enough to blow unfastened helmets away.
I read a few pages from Pemi Aguda’s book then got bored. I took some shots of the scenery as we blew past. The girl besides me kept peering into my phone. I finally extended it to her. She looked at me. “I dash you,” I said. She gave me a smile and looked away. She didn’t peer into my phone again.
Sleep and darkness crept in at almost the same time.
I woke up somewhere between Kaduna and Jos. The closer we got to Jos the colder it became. The girl besides me was asleep too, her head settling on me. The state of the road had gotten worse and the bumps and potholes kept throwing the girl’s head off my shoulder.
The checkpoints increased too. I noticed the passengers passing money to the driver at some points. The driver would then give the bribes to the policemen or soldiers. My Map said we were forty minutes to Jos.
I was lucky I had some change, but I stopped contributing after the third time, after giving the driver a 200 naira note and he let the policeman wave him off without collecting change.
The next checkpoint we got to, he turned towards me. I ignored both him and the policeman standing by his door.
Jos. Finally. It was a ghost town with no single soul in sight. Just corner after corner of police and army checkpoints. 9 pm felt like 2 in the morning. It was later that I understood we had driven into a curfew. I was the only passenger left. Everyone else had dropped at the outskirts of the town.
We got stopped a lot, but they always let us go. I was forced to cough up more change. Once, the driver had to get out of the car to add his abeg to the money. Once, a young soldier came to my side of the car and tried to strike a conversation. But it was too dark and his face was in the shadows.
“I can’t hear you, man,” I told him twice, holding my phone up a bit, the light from my screen illumining his face as I caught “…going to…”
“A hotel,” i said. “I don’t even know.”
He looked like he had more to say, then he turned away and waved us past the barrier. The driver said something I didn’t catch. I didn’t bother to ask him what he said.
We drove into the park. Someone manning the entrance shone a torch into the car, then exchanged pleasantries with the driver. A few men were about, probably drivers or park workers.
“You know where I fit see hotel for this place?” I said to the driver.
He seemed like he was thinking then he pushed a hand out, bidding me to wait. I watched as he walked towards a group of men huddled in the darkness and the cold. I settled to wait and I watched them talk, four strangers trying to figure a way to help me. And for some reason the dream I had a few hours ago in the car came to me.
In the dream, I was in my mother’s house and everything smelled of the camphor she liked to line her wardrobe and boxes with. And it was cold and my mother’s wrapper felt like part of my body. In the dream I can sense laughter coming from one of the rooms, but when I got up to check what’s up, I realized my mother was sitting across the room, a tray on her lap.
“Where you dey go? Where you dey go?”
The driver came back with hotel instructions just as the memory of me telling Iya Martha I was looking for laughter faded away…
